#these bullets reminded me why I never do anything that needs a repetitive pattern

[sachart]

This is my entry for HBOWarDaily's Secret Santa 2024!

Merry Christmas, @neptunes-blue !❄️❄️❄️

[cracking-the-mind]

My Thoughts on Delta Rune

This is probably going to go all over the place but I just need to put my thoughts down somewhere before I can really go forward with any of my speculations.

I’ll give you the tl;dr version first: The game is not finished yet (obviously) and it could GREATLY go with some expansion on its game mechanics and enemies as well as giving depth to the secondary characters in the story. That said, what we’ve received in the first chapter is something that I still enjoyed greatly and is something that I’ll be thinking about for months to come. I’ll be patiently waiting for the next chapters.

I’ll stick my in-depth analysis under a cut for you to save people from a wall of text.

I guess we’ll go in chronological order? Right, okay, the beginning of the story. It feels... incredibly melancholy and lonely despite the people waving at the car as you drive by and the happy music playing. Your/Kris’s entire side of the room is devoid of decoration save for a red wagon and a bird cage that I’m not even going to touch with a fifty foot pole for right now. You then learn that Asriel’s your brother and that he’s gone off to university, leaving the small town he lived in behind. And from what you gather as you go along in the story is that you two were inseparable and him leaving had apparently taken a toll on you. Now it’s just you and your mom in a house that feels all too big for the both of you. It’s just you.

Now, the beginning school bit left me on edge for the sake of how it could hit so close to home for so many people. The social outcastedness despite how others may (poorly) attempt to include you. It’s... jarring in a sense. Now, you’re left without a partner in group work due to you being late. The teacher then pairs you up with Susie, the other social outcast/bully in the class, but sends the both of you off to get chalk before the work can begin. If you go around and talk to everyone before leaving, they give their condolences and are already planning your funeral because Susie is apparently going to murder you.

And, well... she threatens you like she’s going to. And the part that gets me is that for the whole time...

you don’t fight back.

As Susie slams you up against the wall of lockers with one hand and threatens you again and again, you do nothing. You hang there limply without moving a muscle.

Though plot armor prevails and you survive (if you were murdered, what kind of story would the first chapter be? Actually... that’d be a very interesting ending point but I’m not going to go any further with that.) and you continue to storage closet that’s black as pitch. Lo and behold, an entire kingdom of Darkness is in that storage closet. You and Susie are separated briefly and you’ve somehow changed clothes in to something straight out of a JRPG. Spoilers, you’re in one.

And thus, you and Susie both wander the paths before stumbling upon a section of a kingdom that has a giant geyser spouting from it. And there, you meet Ralsei, and prince from the Darkness. He claims you’re both heroes that are destined to save this place. Now, as much of a giant prick Susie has been to you so far, I relate to her in the sense that she doesn’t want to have any part of this weird acid trip that she’s having and just wants to get back. (Even though she is apparently okay with apparently letting everyone die around her if she doesn’t cooperate. It’s a tough pill to swallow and I don’t necessarily blame her for trying to call the bluff about what Ralsei is saying.)

Before that, you end up meeting (and fighting) Lancer, an enigmatic person? monster? who’s apparently been tasked with capturing or dispatching you under the king’s orders. You eventually get the advantage in the fight and he flees. Now given a real taste of the things going on in the kingdom, Susie begrudgingly agrees to go along with it and the adventure truly begins.

Whew, that went on a lot longer than I thought. I’ll try and keep things a lot briefer now.

I’ll be honest, I really didn’t trust Ralsei at first. He explains things in thorough detail a lot and was always kind and patient, even if very a little gullible, from the get go. Plus, it always felt like he was never surprised from any kind of event in your adventure. Though he does end up being a staunch ally all the way through even though he was the person who made Susie defect because she was very un-hero like. Perhaps it was just my skeptical nature that distrusted Ralsei so much? Who knows.

Lancer reminds me very much of Papyrus in a sense. Despite their vocal reasons of why they’re doing such a thing, what they apparently needed the most was a friend. And that comes in the form of Susie. They get along like two peas in a pod when they’re designing their ‘evil’ schemes. He’s incredibly nonsensical ( He doesn’t even have a walk animation! He just slides along the floor.) and seems to be motivated mostly by his own whimsy. I’d even call him immature at times. He has some incredible facial expressions, boy howdy. I snorted very loudly when I saw that facial expression. You know what I’m talking about. He enjoys digging holes for some reason? And then putting salsa and other various things in them?? Even though he’s clearly stated that he’s one of the ‘bad guys’ he doesn’t hesitate to join up with you for a little bit to just chat and such as you’re walking. Though he does inevitably lock you up once he realizes that you’re going to have to leave and take down his dad, the king.

I’ve read a few things where people really did not like Susie, despite how she grows as a character. She acts very much like a brute and doesn’t bat an eye at beating people down for her personal gain. In the beginning, you can’t control her in battle and you have to use your first turn to warn others about her attacks. Susie leaves the party constantly and is vocal in that she hates that she has to put with this hero crap. She’s realizes this (most likely even before she even fell down) and decides to just roll with it. She lets herself be placed in the brute category so people don’t have expectations from her. And from that, she ends up isolated. Though once she ends up becoming a ‘bad guy’ for a little while, she legitimately enjoys herself as she’s scheming with Lancer. Though with that, there’s a side of Susie that most people aren’t likely to see, a side that cares for her friends. She gives Lancer that fruit from the tree that he hasn’t tasted even when she’s hungry and she praises them both for their work. With Lancer, she could just be herself and be accepted for who she is. Which is why she ends up feeling so betrayed when Lancer locks her up with both you and Ralsei when you reach the castle. In her battle with Lancer, I was so torn in what I wanted to do, but I ended up forcefully moving the soul to hit Lancer’s bullets until he moves them out of the way. When she realizes what she’s doing, she first continues to attack until she ends up purposefully missing, stopping the battle. From there, they have a heart to heart and I couldn’t help but smile as she realizes that her actions have been getting others hurt and what’s worse, she ended up hurting her friend because she wouldn’t listen. While she doesn’t show it in an outright way, she comes to rely on both you and Ralsei and will listen to commands you tell her to do. (Also, if you go back and do group ACTs against different enemies, you get some fun dialogue.) She even comes around and deems you and Ralsei her friends after your fight with the king. Her motivations/backstory clearly do not excuse her actions, but they do help explain why she acts a certain way. And when she does try and change herself, I find that to be incredibly admirable.

Also, I don’t think this bothers much explaining, but the music holy SHIT. Toby Fox still has not disappointed in the slightest in any of the music so far

Now that that’s over and done with, I’m going to go through the world, the enemies, the battle system, and finally the ending.

The world itself is incredibly linear. And yet, I didn’t find much problem with how it was laid out. It has secrets and it rewards you for finding them with maybe different gear or an item. It rewards you with information if you perhaps talk to people more than once or with hints about how to spare an enemy. Though a complaint that I would have is that it’s certainly too small. I felt like I was blazing through the world and missing things when I was not, in fact, missing anything. It did so well in immersing me in the world with the game play and music that I lost track of time.

The enemies are all unique (barring the stronger versions in the castle. I feel like that that’s almost obligatory for every kind of RPG.) and have different kinds of ways to spare them as well as different kinds of bullet patterns. This kind of ties in to how short I find the game is, but I found the enemies to be lacking in variability so the fun of the encounters kind of wanes quickly if you backtrack at all. Additionally, I found the enemies to all be incredibly easy (bar one). For my first run, I had a total of one Game Over. And that’s including my fight with the King and the Jester. On a different note, both the King and the Jester were my favorite fights, too. One for the difficulty and one for the creativity behind it. You can guess which one is which easily enough.

Speaking of Battles, the battle system itself is an improvement from the criticisms that I could understand some had with Undertale. You now have three party members that have different abilities and stats and you can all do group ACTs. If you plan correctly, you could probably finish a fight with multiple enemies in around two turns. There’s now a tension gauge that allows you to do special abilities for the characters and even rewards you for being daring in the bullet patterns. Now, with that, the fights are quick but end up getting repetitive relatively quickly due to it. That also coincides with the enemy variability, but I’ll stop from beating a dead horse.

Now, once the King has been dealt with and the Fountain sealed, you and Susie are cast back to their regular world. It’s now well past school time, and you and Susie split, with her talking about how she wants to go back to that world tomorrow. And now, the entire town opens up to you to freely explore. There’s plenty of faces, both old and new, to talk to. And with happy music playing, it’s like Undertale’s last hurrah where you could go around and chat with everyone.

But even still, the world seems very... cold. Your classmates around the town are all shocked you’re still alive, but apparently don’t care enough about you that you didn’t return from the supply closet for hours when they just talked about how you might’ve gotten killed. Undyne and Alphys don’t even know each other, even when they live in such a small town. Gerson is dead and the ones from the Determination experiments have all passed. Several people remark how you’ve changed for the better for some reason, which is good. Though they then also passively remark how weird you were previously. Catty and Bratty hate each other and call one another posers. The bunny running the diner gives you a hot chocolate out of pity when she started reminiscing about you and Asriel visting and getting hot chocolate every Sunday. Asgore, your father, lives in abject poverty. He lives above his flower store and its sad the kind of living conditions he deals with. If you read the notes on the floor, he’s past due on his rent and he’s mocked about giving away flowers out of kindness and needs to start selling them. Still, it’s heart wrenching to me that Toriel kept the kids and the house while Asgore is left with pretty much nothing. And Toriel still hates his guts when you give Asgore’s flowers to her.

Sans and Papyrus have just moved in to town with Sans apparently taking over the local grocery store. There was something about the way Sans acts to us that just rubs me the wrong way. He gives us a fake phone number for crying babies and then jokes about how he fucked your mom last night. It’s not even that stupid punning that he does, it’s just being rude to somebody he just met. What is also concerning to me is that Papyrus hadn’t left the house yet. He’d probably be one of the first people to be running around, introducing himself to people, don’t you think?

Anyway, now that that’s all done and you’ve talked to everyone, you’re tired and you go to bed to go to school the next day. And then during the middle of the night, Kris is thrown from their bed and begin walking like someone possessed or a zombie of sorts. They then proceed to dig in to their chest, wrench out their SOUL, and throw it in to the bird cage in the wagon. And then, out of nowhere, they produce a knife and smile a too broad smile. And then it ends.

Okay, inhale... exhale. WHAT THE FUCKKKK. I’m sure the rest of the people who played this game weren’t entirely expecting that ending. But now, it leaves everyone with even more questions.

My overall thoughts on this game are still incredibly positive and a lot my criticisms have to do with the length, which is something that shouldn’t be much of a problem once another chapter is released. Though what is sad to me is that a lot of what made Undertale endearing to me has been altered in to something more depressing. Or unwelcoming even. Though I don’t have to compare it directly to Undertale due to, as Toby said, it not being related to Undertale much at all. Just a similar set of characters. However, this is still the first chapter and the lore and story has still much to be explained and divulged. I eagerly await for more.

[gta-5-cheats]

How Chessable's Scientific Teaching Methods Can Help You Improve at Chess

New Post has been published on http://secondcovers.com/how-chessables-scientific-teaching-methods-can-help-you-improve-at-chess/

How Chessable's Scientific Teaching Methods Can Help You Improve at Chess

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Chess is one of the world’s oldest board games with no shortage of players and coaches online and offline. There’s a wealth of chess books and computer programs that can help you learn the game and hone your skills. Chessable, a two-year-old startup believes that it offers something unique — a razor-sharp focus on teaching chess.

Chessable does not let you play against other players or the computer. It features interactive chess books — both free and paid — and tries to make sure that you improve at chess, no matter what level you’re at. Its approach to this is rooted in science and certain fundamentals of learning new skills. It aims at teaching chess via spaced repetition. Once you learn a set of moves, it prompts you to revise them after a few hours. If you remember the moves you won’t have to revise it for a relatively long time, but if you don’t, it’ll teach you those moves again and schedule a revision a short while after. This is similar to some of the methods Duolingo uses to teach people new languages and its efficacy has been established.

Five Websites to Learn and Play Chess Online

Chessable also has a fun points system to give you a sense of accomplishment for learning moves, a daily streak to keep you hooked to learning, and you can also earn rubies in game that let you preserve your streak for longer if you miss out a day or two, among other things. This gamification tactic is well-known in the free-to-play game industry and has even been used to great effect by apps such as Snapchat. When you combine this with chess books from experts that help you raise your game, you begin to see why Chessable is beginning to develop a significant following.

David Kramaley, the co-founder and CEO of Chessable, told Gadgets 360 over email that his friend (and later, co-founder) IM (International Master)) John Bartholomew really liked the idea of a chess education startup but the path was far from smooth. He told Gadgets 360: “At every point, if the feedback was completely negative (no one used it, I was ready to fold). However, I’m a fairly optimistic person so it’s quite possible quitting was never truly an option.”

Kramaley first came across Bartholomew’s YouTube channel when it had just 3,000 subscribers and he was impressed by Bartholomew’s ability to teach chess. He felt that the two could make a good team and the two agreed to meet for a demo of Chessable. “I honestly went to him with a self-critical point of view, wanting him to like it but at the same time wanting his honest opinion of my MVP. Fortunately, John loved my demo and my ability to recite some extremely complex Chess Theory, and we went from there,”

“I also had great difficulties improving my own chess, to the point I felt there must be some truth to the commonly held knowledge that adults are not able to improve at chess as well as kids. I’ve always found it a great joy to learn new things and I have always improved,” Kramaley said. “Failing to improve at chess time and time again, despite using the existing learning tools, indicated to me that there is a gap in the market for a site that would exclusively focus on learning and improving at chess. Concentrating on the learning would be our first and most important differentiator from the competition,” he added.

Dr. Tim McGrew, chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Western Michigan University in the US, has seen a big improvement in his game after he added Chessable to his training regimen. Dr. McGrew is one of the few chess players to actually improve their FIDE (Fédération Internationale des Échecs or World Chess Federation) rating in their 50s, as he achieved an elusive 2200 rating in 2016 after he started using Chessable. “Conventional wisdom isn’t altogether wrong. Chess is a game that depends a great deal on mental flexibility, memory, and internal ‘clock speed,’ and these are factors that heavily favour younger minds,” Dr. McGrew told Gadgets 360 over email. “All else being equal, there is no way that someone at age 50 can learn and retain as much information as he could at half that age.”

However, that doesn’t mean you can’t improve your game once you are older. “Just because one’s mind isn’t as flexible or one’s memory as retentive as it used to be, it does not follow that one cannot improve in those departments. Memory, in particular, can be assisted by intelligent use of spaced repetition,” said Dr. McGrew, who’s been playing chess from a very young age, adding that Chessable provides just that. “…once you see it, the idea is so obvious that it’s rather shocking no one had done it before. The beauty of the idea is that the server keeps track of what you need to review for you, so that you’re reminded to review things you didn’t even realise you needed to review.”

Dr. McGrew, who came into the spotlight briefly in 1997 for spotting a move that would have allowed Garry Kasparov to draw a game that he resigned against IBM’s Deep Blue computer program, thinks that if you take Chessable’s review process seriously, you could “master an entire new opening system in a minimum time span and with maximum retention”. He said, “It isn’t going to give you a photographic memory. No system of review can do that. But I’ve found myself learning and retaining more patterns, more variations, here in my fifties than I ever did back when I was in my twenties and studying in an unsystematic way. And I’ve used what I’ve learned on Chessable to reach the National Master title.”

While Dr. McGrew was one of Chessable’s early adopters and remains one of its most dedicated users, the startup couldn’t have succeeded if beginners and intermediate players didn’t find it just as useful. Kramaley said Chessable has focused on offering something for chess players at every skill level. “Since we’ve been working with an incremental approach, we could not cater for everyone straight away. Initially the site was heavily oriented towards intermediate players and above (but not masters),” Kramaley explained. “Slowly, with the work we’ve been doing, we’ve been adding features and content that helps cater to more beginning players as well as masters… For instance, at the end of last year we launched 1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners, a great book that is suitable for anyone who at least knows the rules of chess. If they go through this book I am confident they’d come out the other end as intermediate players.”

The site also has books for experts such as Hyper Accelerated Dragon by IM Raja Panjwani, one of Canada’s top chess players, and 100 Endgames You Must Know that’s geared towards advanced players such as Peter Newhall, a 37-year-old from Minnesota, USA. Newhall told Gadgets 360 via email that the book has helped him feel more comfortable going into endgames, something he wasn’t as good at as opening games.

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“Previously I had tried reviewing chess openings with my own Chessbase files and with Chess Position Trainer. Both should work in theory but in practice I simply wouldn’t do the studying. Neither interface was fun or felt that easy to use. However, with Chessable I’ve studied openings almost every day since they started and currently have a 530-day studying streak,” Newhall, who runs the day-to-day operations of a web design and development company, said. While earning points, rubies, and maintaining a daily streak might seem like something that experts may frown upon, Newhall is among those who’ve found it to be very useful.

Newhall’s rating has gone up from around 1800 to 1950 since the time he discovered Chessable thanks to John Bartholomew’s YouTube channel. He explained: “I would say my game has definitely improved. However, I’ve been studying in other ways too the past couple of years so it’s hard to say what’s made the biggest difference.” Chessable wasn’t the only method of study for him, but it remains one of the factors that helped him raise his game.

“I am never caught completely off guard in the opening any longer and at least have some idea what to do even in lines I’ve reviewed but haven’t played before. However, I do not play super sharp openings where one can be winning in the opening at my level very frequently. So I still need to play well the rest of the game — knowing my openings better is not an instant ‘magic bullet’ or anything like that,” Newhall added, describing his style of play and what has helped him improve his ranking. “I have definitely noticed that I probably get the type of position I want 90 percent of the long games I play. It is very nice to go into a game at any time and feel confident you will not be losing or much worse after 5-10 moves in the opening. It takes a lot of initial pressure off and I can ease into the game better without immediately feeling like I have no idea what’s going on,” he said.

Getting into a game and not feeling completely lost or being caught off-guard is something that many casual players strive for and Chessable does offer tools to help you avoid that. As Chessable’s co-founder Kramaley puts it, “I guess in short, Chessable is a tool suitable for all, what matters is what course you choose once you are inside. Our goal is to keep adding new courses so that there is something for everyone.”

It’s clear that the users are behind the product, but Chessable is committed to growing only at a sustainable pace. Kramaley said his previous startup Sharkius failed because he expanded it too soon, and a prominent US-based VC told him that “chess is a market where it pays to remain lean”. That is why Chessable, two years into its journey, only has a full-time team of four, with four more working part-time. While staying lean gives Chessable a longer runway, it comes with its own challenges as new features take longer to implement. However, with around 1,500 weekly active learners and 20,000 unique visitors per month, Chessable does appear to be on to something. At the moment, most of the people using Chessable are based in US, UK, and Germany, and around 3 percent of them are from India. Kramaley says the site still has some work to do before pushing for international growth but he expects that to happen sometime in 2019.

Chessable makes money from pro subscriptions at $10 (roughly Rs. 640) per month, or less if you pay yearly. Pro subscriptions offer the ability to find and focus on moves that are difficult for you, and removes lots of limitations on the free tier. The startup still makes about half of its revenue from subscriptions and the rest from selling interactive chess books. The startup also has an interesting “lifetime” subscription tier at $300 (roughly Rs. 19,000) that gives you access to all pro features for as long as the site’s around.

Chessable hasn’t yet become profitable but Kramaley says that at some point in 2018, he expects Chessable to cross over into the “default alive state” as Y Combinator’s Paul Graham puts it – “Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it’s been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die?” Chessable has raised two rounds of funding, “so we are completely ok for years to come”, Kramaley tells Gadgets 360.

Chessable does not have any apps but it works very well on desktop and mobile browsers that we’ve used. Kramaley, in his email, says, “Ironically this past month I’ve had some of the worst internet for a while… in the south of France. Chessable works pretty well still; if you can put up with the odd page not loading here and there. We’ve used current (non-app) technology as well as possible to allow for poor connections and if can find more ways to optimise it we will.”

The users whom we spoke with over email feel that Chessable does have some room for improvement. Newhall told Gadgets 360: “The one area I’ve always wanted Chessable to improve but it hasn’t yet is to have an export feature. I know it is coming but for a player like me, who mainly has my own opening lines on the site to review, it is tough to have to manually keep Chessable and my own .pgn files up-to-date and matching on my own.”

PGN files are widely used to record chess moves and you could think of them as the mp3 of the chess world (everyone uses them). “Especially strong players have their own routine figured out long ago and it always involves Chessbase and .pgn files. They are less likely to switch to something like Chessable since they already have a routine that works for them on openings,” Newhall added.

Dr. McGrew on the other hand said that there are more forms of study that the site could support. “I think there is room for the introduction of some new study methods – all founded on the same learning science that shapes everything they do at Chessable – that would increase the extent to which the system not only trains memory but also activates the more deliberate analytical section of one’s mind,” he added. He would also like the site to implement some more methods to create new training programs. “I’d tell you what those methods are, but I’m saving them to tell to David Kramaley in the hope that I can persuade him to implement them before someone else does.”

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